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On this edition James speaks with Colorado-based filmmaker, educator and activist Danny Ledonne. Mr. Ledonne is a former media arts professor at Adams State University in Alamosa Colorado whose investigation and online exposés of Adams State’s managerial and personnel practices put him in the crosshairs of the school’s top administrators.

When the highly-credentialed filmmaker was glossed over for a tenure-track teaching position in the university’s modest communications department and subsequently terminated from his adjunct instructor position there he made public records requests that revealed a number of administrative problems and efforts at non-transparency. Leone began a blog to publish these, WatchingAdams.org, and a lá Julian Assange invited other faculty to leak information that might aid in keeping Adams State’s pooh-bahs fair and above-the-board.

Legendary iconoclast Tony Hendra joins Real Politik to discuss the history of postwar comedy and his role therein. Hendra is best-known for playing Ian Faith, manager of the mock heavy metal band Spinal Tap. He was also a pioneer in early British political satire, working with Monty Python founding members Graham Chapman and John Cleese, and was the first managing editor of the National Lampoon, America’s pioneer multimedia comedy powerhouse, where he worked alongside Lampoon founders Doug Kenney, Henry Beard and Rob Hoffman. While at Lampoon Hendra produced the Woodstock mockery Lemmings, discovering such figures as John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Christopher Guest.

On this week’s edition James covers the police state and war on terror at home over the past week as “active shooter drills” turn deadly with live rounds fired in Florida and Tennessee. We also examine the war on free thought and speech throughout the US as exemplified by Oberlin College’s new investigation of Prof. Joy Karega for social media postings.

State and federal officials continue to collect urine samples as Miami sprays local neighborhoods with a deadly insecticide in an effort to control the Zika virus. We listen to an excerpt from an important previously-recorded interview with investigative journalist Jon Rappoport to recontemplate the dubious nature and origins of the so-called Zika outbreak.

Citizen journalist Robin from Honr.info and YouTube channel HowISee the World joins James this week to discuss the Orlando mass shooting event and other related “terrorist” narratives now commonplace in the corporate media terrain.

Robin’s online research and analysis of such poorly-understood incidents suggest how easy it should be for journalists and news organizations to examine the storylines presented by government agencies and spokespersons. Over the past several years he has made dozens of recorded calls to the very official parties whose feet need to be held to the fire, including the FBI and medical personnel, yet who are rarely held to account in any meaningful way by salaried reporters.

Americans today have an almost identical recollection of World War Two as the “good war”, fought by their forebears against maniacally evil “Nazis” and “Japs”. Yet how much do we really know about that crucial event and the decades of complex European history preceding it? Why, and for whom, were the twentieth century’s world wars actually waged?

M.S. “Mike” King joins James to discuss his book The Bad War: The Truth Never Taught About World War 2. Mike is a private investigative journalist, researcher, and political analyst based in the New York City area. A 1987 graduate of Rutgers University, he spent 30 years in marketing and advertising–areas of expertise that have equipped him with a unique perspective when it comes to understanding how “public opinion” on decisive issues and events has been scientifically manufactured for at least a century.